It's much more likely that one of your video cards is not compatible with your others rather than not being compatible with XP.
I'm heading over to grab an SSD drive and an external HDD dock here in a sec... If I'm only planning on using the SSD drive for the OS, would a 40GB SSD drive work for that purpose? Or would it make more sense to buy a bigger SSD drive? I only use my computer for trading and other basic purposes. Nothing else.
40GB is OK if that's enough room for your stuff. It will be slower than larger SSDs due to less "parallelism", but still faster than a spinner drive. If you're planning to get an "external drive" to hook up via USB, let me suggest you get an "external drive enclosure" instead. The enclosure is designed to allow you to remove/change the drive inside if you want or if needed... the "external drive" may not allow you to open it without breaking it.
Just saw your last post... I guess I could try the LLF first. Or do you think it just makes more sense to get the SSD drive as my main OS drive regardless?
Well, it will be faster. And there is some benefit to having your OS on one drive and the rest on another (especially if you have lots of stuff)... the downside to that is the need to make copies/images of both for backup.
I have 2 TB drives and 1 250GB drive, so I have plenty of back-up space if need be. I could just go get a cloner or an external HDD dock in order to make copies of both images if need be, right?
1. A "dock" isn't necessary... you need imaging/cloning software. 2. To make a clone of each 1G drive, you'd need 4 drives.... each big enough to hold the amount of stuff on the drive. That is, if your 1G drives are nearly full, you'd need other 1G drives to make clones. If one of your 1Gs has only 150MB of stuff on it, you could clone it onto the 250GB drive.
JMiles: If you haven't tried the Low Level Format approach yet - Get all the data now on the "bad" drive. Move it. You will lose almost all installed programs as Windows makes it very difficult to move programs that are part of the Registry. Once you've moved everything - 1) Disconnect the good drive data and power cable. If you are not sure which is which just disconnect one at a time and it will become clear. 2) Turn machine on. It will attempt to boot from the "bad" drive. 3) Assuming it does not boot put your Win 7 CD in the machine. Be ABSOLUTELY sure you only have power/data cables connected to the "bad" drive! 4) Restart. The machine should go to the CD/DVD drive and attempt to install Win 7. - Let it. Let it format the drive if it wants to. The new install should overwrite the bad Master Boot file (along with everything else). 5) Ensure the installation is good. You should see the "C" drive. 6) Reconnect the old good drives cables. 7) Turn on. The machine should boot in Win 7. You should have C and D drives (and CD/DVD drives ). 8)Install program files. Hopefully you have a high speed internet connection as there are many,many, files that Win 7 will download to get all patches installed. Have fun. Jack
Thanks for the replies everyone. I ended up going with the Intel 120gb SSD 330 series. It got really good reviews online and the guys at the computer shop recommended it. I tried to format the drive both ways, but it still never allowed me to install Win7 during the installation process. I have no idea why. In the end, I feel like an upgrade was probably needed anyway and I got a good deal on the drive ($106 locally). My mobo and other hardware appears to be fine for now (all 6 monitors started up right away). The drive seems super fast so far, but I haven't downloaded much to it yet. I also bought what they called a "cloner" at the store... something like an HDD external dock. It has more functionality, but doesn't have the "look" of the dock. I plan to pull everything off of my current XP-drive and back it up to the apparently defunct but still seemingly data capable old Win7 drive. I'm looking forward to the speed of this new drive. I think my esignal will probably run much smoother now (though I didn't really have that many problems in the past). Thanks again!
Caution using a suspect drive for backing up vital information, you should seriously consider using a new or functioning drive. You can always use the defunct drive after it has been deleted and re-formatted for something else later. Nothing worse than losing all your vital data, by trying to save a few bucks. I am old school, and actually have my most precious files on multiple disks... Good luck with the rest, Intel 120gb. SSD is a good choice.